Fatshark is hastily putting a final lick of paint onto the longboats, tightening the braids on their beards, and making sure all the fish has plenty of salt for the people who they hope will buy into Early Access of War of the Vikings on Steam. It’s their follow-up to the generally well received War of the Roses, and as the title suggests, the battles here aren’t over who gets the last Tangy Orange Creme, but instead about vikings with axes disagreeing with other vikings. I wonder how they’ll come to terms over their differences?
How early is this access? Well, you’ll be paying to play two game modes, Arena and Team Deathmatch, across four maps. You’ll have three profiles, currently fixed so there’s no beard customisation yet, and a pile of weaponry. Early Access grants the adopters a few perks, including bonus in-game currency and patterns for the most basic buy-in (on sale at £13.49), the middle tier (£20.69) adds art books, the soundtrack, unlocked patterns and a the first new character archetype DLC, while the top tier (for a ridiculous £90) adds all future content and a few unique bits of bling. I’d personally say that’s too much to pay outright for a game, but then I remember how much I spent on Elite: Dangerous and shut up (it was more – the shame of it all!).

Here’s what they’re selling, and unsurprisingly it looks a lot like War of the Roses.

Did that do it for you? I’m downloading it right now to see if it’s worth a write-up.

It’s comments like this that made me wonder about the ‘generally well received’ part of the article. Since WotR released I don’t remember hearing a whole lot good about the game apart from it having potential.

I think they have tweaked the game somewhat over wotr based on just an hour or two in the alpha, though I couldn’t get the game over 20fps at the time. Still if I had to buy one of these at gun point it would be wotv, but I’d rather just play mount & blade.

The part that really bugs me though is how little they fixed up WOTR and just sort of decided to reskin and tweak a bit and make people pay all over again. I love the ‘melee fps’ genera and hope it continues to grow, just I don’t feel like fatshark has the talent or maybe just the time and money to make the game right.

WOTR was still a great shame, I wanted it to be good, but even though mostly fatigued with m&b I still have wondered back to it, still nothing like it out there.

Once you get into it, can you let us know how the combat feels and weather or not they are still using that awful squad spawning mechanic from WotR? Nothing ruined the WotR combat more than having some dudes spawn out of thin air while scrapping with an enemy.

I played in the Alpha for this and liked it a lot. They fixed most of problems that I had with WotR. And I was really excited to play this again but all this focus on preorder bonuses, DLC and paid unlocks makes me wary. I really don’t like it when multiplayer games do stuff like this since it usually leads to grindfests (like WotR). With F2P you at least now what you are getting yourself into.

I played the alpha for this. If you didn’t like War of The Roses, avoid War of The Vikings. Its just a reskin with Vikings. They haven’t even fixed the issues that are still in WotR. Don’t get me wrong, Kingmaker makes WotR worth playing, but not enough to warrant calling it a vastly improved game.

I definitely think a lot of changes have occured since WOTR, I much prefer this.

link to steamcommunity.com This developer post highlights some of the changes that have been made. And in game and on the steam hub there’s a road map that show’s a lot of the new features that will appear before release.

Not too many years ago, expansion packs came with substantial content (like TES: Tribunal) and didn’t consist mostly of re-skinned assets from the original game and a dark cloud of additional DLC looming above it. Which was my (poorly worded) point, I don’t think this is a proper expansion. I think it’s a rip-off.